A comparison of three types of services with self-service technologies in service encounters

DS 75-4: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED13), Design for Harmonies, Vol.4: Product, Service and Systems Design , Seoul, Korea, 19-22.08.2013

Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Ho, Shu-Shiuan; Lee, Yi-Chia; Sung, Tung-Jung
Series: ICED
Institution: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, Republic of China
Page(s): 109-118
ISBN: 978-1-904670-47-6
ISSN: 2220-4334

Abstract

Self-service technologies (SSTs) have increasingly been changing the relationship between customers and firms. Therefore, it is a crucial issue for many service providers to understand customer-perceived service encounters. Although there are varied characteristics of SSTs in our daily life, research which has documented the link between customer encounters and SSTs is little. Therefore, the aim of this study attempts to explore service encounters on three types of services (the KTV system, the ticket vending machine, and the city guide kiosk) with SSTs. This study first adopted the critical incident technique (CIT) to collect a total of 722 critical incidents from participants in interviews. This study further categorized these critical incidents into a hierarchy-level service encounters construction. Finally, this study found that “poor design” received the highest percentage at the service failures level of dissatisfactory service encounters. Moreover, there were some deviations among these three types of services with SSTs at the interaction issue level. In addition, this study further proposed some service design suggestions to reduce the negative critical incidents.

Keywords: Service design, service encounter, SSTs, CIT

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